The Blog Begins

This is not really the start of Open Sapi as it has been running for almost a year now, initially started in October 2008.

This project was inspired due to the lack of high quality speech engines in a variety of languages availalbe in other operating systems. The aim of the project is to use the Microsoft Speech API in combination with high quality SAPI speech engines on any other operating system. 

I have been concentrating on Linux and in particular Ubuntu. The project is still in a pre-release development stage and can be found at http://code.google.com/p/open-sapi/.

Currently the client and server are both stable. The system performance and reliability in use is questionable due to the projects reliance on lots of other component.

This has kept me busy now for almost a year of development in my free time. I will shortly be recording a video of my system demonstrating the use of a native Microsoft Speech Engine in Linux.

The primary use of the project has been in combination with Orca and Speech Dispatcher to provide TTS feedback using any SAPI engine on the Linux Desktop. 

So far there have been three other branches that the work i have been doing has been useful in.

The first is a modified version of the server that can be run in any operating system that provides the Rockbox Utility access to the full features available through SAPI 5.1 and to generate speech to use in the accessibility features of Rockbox with High Quality SAPI engines.

The second is the use of Speech enabled Windows Games in Linux this allow the games to run as they would in Windows giving speech output as they would when run in Microsoft.

The Final Project is a new joint venture to try and use the other element of the Microsoft Speech API to get the Speech Recognition to work and be integrated into Linux. The idea is to get the SR engine from Dragon Naturally Speaking to process speech in the background and use a similar architecture as Open Sapi for integrating into the Linux Desktop. I have helping out on the side of this project as I gained a lot of knowledge when i implemented the Text To Speech side.

There is a large amount of work to be getting on with so I will say good day for the moment and keep adding information as I go.